Canadian connections to Westminster Abbey

When Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot in Westminster Abbey, they'll be in good company. That's because London's famous medieval abbey has many historical ties to our own home and native land.

Westminster Abbey is both a national church and a national tomb.

"We have just over 3,000 people actually buried in the abbey and cloisters," says Christine Reynolds, the abbey's assistant keeper of muniments (records).

Slightly more than 600 of these departed souls have memorials. Other monuments and tablets recall people buried elsewhere.

Many will be familiar to Canadian visitors, while others perhaps less so. Here's a quick guide to some of the who's who in the abbey:

- Sir John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), Canada's first prime minister. Queen Victoria made him a Knight of the Order of the Bath in 1884. His nameplate in the Lady Chapel reminds us of his patriotic election cry: "I am a British subject and British born, and a British subject I hope to die."

- Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), who disappeared in 1845 trying to discover Northwest Passage through Canada's arctic. The monument in the St. John Chapel owes much to his widow who led a 12-year effort to discover his fate. His epitaph, penned by Tennyson, reads: "Not here: The white north has thy bones; and thou, heroic sailor-soul, art passing on thine happier voyage now toward no earthly pole."

- Sir Francis Leopold McClintock (1818-1907), commemorated in the same chapel. He established Franklin's fate in 1859 after discovering some remains of Franklin's expedition near King William Island and earned the name "Arctic Fox." Mc-Clintock was also famous for adopting Inuit dog sleds to get across the ice, which opened up polar exploration beyond the range of ships.

- Major-General James Wolfe (1727-1759). His unmistakable monument rises massively above an empty marble sarcophagus (his body lies in Greenwich). Curiously, the face on the monument isn't his. Wolfe died before he was famous and didn't have a portrait to show what he looked like. His corpse didn't help either. It was too decomposed after it arrived back in Britain to take a death mask. So the monument's sculptor Joseph Wilton used a manservant, who was said to look like Wolfe, as his model.

- Admiral Sir Charles Saunders (1714-1775), in the Islip chapel, a forgotten but key player in Wolfe's capture of Quebec. This capable but quiet man manoeuvred the British Navy down the uncharted St. Lawrence River to defeat Quebec. Along with Brigadier-general George Townshend (1724-1807), Saunders signed the document of Quebec's surrender. Horace Walpole said of him: "No man said less, or deserved more."

- William Pitt(1708-1778), first Earl of Chatham, is in Statesmen's Aisle. He was the real mastermind behind the British conquest of Canada. He became prime minister in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) against France and shifted the army's efforts from Europe to North America, which led to the capture of Louisbourg, Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh in his honour) and Quebec.

- Robert Stewart (1769-1822), Lord Castlereagh, a British foreign minister who was so busy fighting Napoleon he inadvertently caused our War of 1812. Castlereagh misjudged the anger of the U.S. over Britain's use of the Royal Navy to board neutral ships. For Americans, Britain "ruled the waves and waived the rules," so they invaded Canada. A tall, painfully thin man who always dressed in black, Castlereagh eventually took his own life. The poet Byron wrote: Posterity will ne'er survey A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh: Stop, traveller, and piss.

- Jonas Hanway (c. 1712-1796). He was an eccentric philanthropist who helped rebuild Montreal after a devastating fire in 1765. His fundraising help pay for two fire trucks and an early bust of mad King George III (now in the McCord Museum). Hanway also introduced umbrellas to London in the mid-1750s, which ultimately replaced waterproof hats made of Canadian beaver pelts and ended the fur trade.

- George Montague-Dunk (1716-1771), second Earl Halifax. As president of Britain's board of trade, Halifax ordered an English town to be built in Nova Scotia in 1749 and named it after himself. However, the cost for his vanity outraged many back home. Edmund Burke proclaimed: "Good God! What sum the nursing of that ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat, has cost to this wittol nation!" Two cherubs on Halifax's monument hold up a mirror of prudence while treading on hypocrisy. The Earl's detractors thought it should have been the other way around.

- King Henry VII (1457-1509). He and his wife, Elizabeth of York, established the Tudor dynasty and are buried in a black marble tomb in their own chapel. In 1497, Henry saw the Spanish getting wealthy in South America and sponsored John Cabot (c. 1450-1499) "to seeke out, discover, and finde" other parts of the new world. Cabot discovered Newfoundland and Henry, who wanted gold, got a lot of fish instead.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) in Poet's Corner. Ironically, it was this American poet who best illustrated the terrible expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 by British and colonial forces with his poem Evangeline. The tragedy might have gone widely unnoticed had he not turned it into a powerful love story that fostered a sense of Acadian identity. "Evangeline is so easy for you to read," he once said, "because it was so hard for me to write."

- Donald Smith (1820-1914), first Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal. Smith was a wealthy philanthropist and governor of the Hudson's Bay Company who made his home in London and is remembered with a stained-glass window in the nave. As one of the directors of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, he drove the last spike in 1885 and badly bent it. Strathcona worked well into his 90s and is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery next to his wife Isabella.

- Andrew Bonar Law (1858-1923). Born in New Brunswick, he was the only British prime minister born outside of Britain. Serving just 209 days, he also was the least known. His rival, the Liberal prime minister Henry Herbert Asquith, once quipped: "It is fitting that we should have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier."

- Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), first Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was born in New Zealand. Rutherford was Chair of Physics at McGill University from 1898 to 1907. His work on radiation led to his award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and ultimately to the development of the atomic bomb.

Lastly, even the building itself has a Canadian connection. It was part of the inspiration for Montreal's Notre-Dame Basilica, which was completed in 1843. The two 18thcentury towers, as well as many other details, were borrowed by the Basilica's Irish American architect, James O'Donnell, for this Canadian neo-gothic masterpiece. Reaction to it was mixed, however. Critics called it a "potpourri of architectural fumbling" and Quebec's Roman Catholic clergy thought it a little too Protestant.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.